En Camino - Iraqhttp://en-camino.org/taxonomy/term/9
en"We Would have Liked To Explain": From Occupation to Liberation in Kurdistanhttp://en-camino.org/node/32
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Andrea Schmidt</p>
<p>May 4, 2004</p>
<p>Suleymania, Liberated Kurdistan</p>
<p>Visiting Kurdistan as an anti-occupation, anti-imperialist is, admittedly, a head wreck.</p>
<p>It isn’t just the fact that Suleymania, a university town in the eastern part of the region governed by the PUK, is surrounded by green mountains and lakes and coniferous trees, and looks like a different country than the one I’ve lived in for the past two months. Or the fact that the amount of Kurdish spoken makes it sound like a different country. Or even the fact that the distinctly Kurdish culture, evident to a first-time visitor in dress and in a propensity for lavish Friday picnics, makes it feel like a different country.</p>
<p>It isn’t the fact that the Kurdish flag flies proudly next to the Iraqi flag. (The old one – the new one hasn’t caught on any better here than it has in the rest of Iraq.) It isn’t even that the US Occupation Forces who are posted in the area are strangely invisible, or that there is unanimity among the cab drivers polled by my travel companion that Suleymania is good and completely safe these days. “Suleymania is heaven,” says one man emphatically. You don’t get that very often in Baghdad.</p>
<p>No. It is a head wreck because it becomes very easy to understand why the Kurdish majority in this region -- who some in the anti-occupation movement have found it so easy to disparage, dismiss and ignore for collaborating with the US-led occupation -- has decided that it is a worthwhile bargain to accept US intervention in order to preserve space in which to determine their future as a self-governed nation. It is a space they fought for in the 1991 uprisings, and a space that they have been able to develop over the past thirteen years of relative autonomy from Saddam and the Ba'athist regime in Baghdad that brutalized them for years before.</p>
<p>We go to visit the Women’s Information and Culture Center, one of the many women’s centers that have emerged in that space. They publish a newspaper and do media and awareness work around women’s issues, including honor killings and forced marriages. But Runak Faraj, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper, is less interested in discussing the Center’s activities than in setting things straight for the two anti-war activists sitting in her office. “We would have liked to explain to the people who were against the war and the sanctions that they should try to live the way we lived. The majority of Kurds would be happy to have the US forces stay. … Because of many years of war and struggle, we were all alone. The only force stronger [than the regime in Baghdad] is the US force, so we wanted them to stay and help us.” Referring to the US invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, she says, “This is the first chance for the Kurdish people to be free.”</p>
<p>The unfortunately-named Civilization Development Organization, one of a proliferating number of local NGOs based in the city, has relationships with a number of international organizations and funding agencies. The staff at CDO receive us graciously and take us to visit their newest project, the renovation of a building formerly used by the Ba'athist Intelligence Service to house a ‘Democracy Training Center.’ “After the liberation of Iraq, many new groups were established. In Kurdistan, we had 12 years of experience in democratization” [after the 1991 uprisings and the establishment of the US-enforced no-fly zone], says Atta Mohamed Ahmal, General Director of CDO. “We saw that it was necessary to [use our experience to] help the rest of Iraq.”</p>
<p>So in July, the completed training center will host forty delegates who have been recruited from Iraqi NGOs all over the country who attend lectures given by Kurdish, Iraqi and international lecturers on the principles of human rights and democracy, while living in old mukhabarat jail cells that have been converted into dormitories. “We had to put in the windows ourselves,” says Ahmal, “because before there were only walls – very strong walls.” For Ahmal, the transformation of the location is a sign of hope for a new era of democracy in Kurdistan and for the rest of Iraq. I swallow my skepticism, partly a reaction to the fact that project is funded by the Research Triangle Institute International, under the civil society development program they are carrying out across Iraq as a contractor for the CPA and USAID. Isn’t this engineering of ‘civil society’ by foreign funders just a form of soft imperialism, the prettification of occupation?</p>
<p>The nearby National Museum is also housed symbolically in the converted Security Headquarters of the old regime. Photos of what our Kurdish guides refer to as the period “when we were under occupation” in the late 80s line wall after wall. Not much prettifying here. There are pictures of Kurdish martyrs handcuffed to poles, murdered publicly by the Ba’athist regime in order to intimidate the rest of the population. The photos display the faces of the many disappeared, and of house demolitions in some of the 5000 Kurdish villages destroyed by the regime. The ugly face of occupation, so similar in different places, at different times.</p>
<p>There is a picture of a decapitated man, handcuffed to a pole. He is flanked by three smiling Ba'athist soldiers, one of whom is flashing a victory sign. It is the day after the pictures of US reservists torturing and humiliating detainees at Abu Ghraib prison have started circulating in the media. Occupation – the attempt to completely dehumanize the people whose land you occupy.</p>
<p>The Ba'athist occupation of Kurdistan and dehumanization of the Kurds involved the forced displacement in Kirkuk and other strategic areas, detention, torture, the destruction of over 5,000 towns and villages and ultimately, the genocidal Anfal campaign during the final stages of the Iran-Iraq war that systematically killed over 100,000 Kurds and included the deployment of chemical weapons on the Kurdish population. During the March 16th 1988 attack on the town of Halabja, only the most famous of the Anfal offensives, over 5,000 people were massacred and 11,000 injured by the gas.</p>
<p>Maybe all uprisings are similar too, I think as our guides proudly point out the peshmerga in a series of photos taken on the first days of the Kurdish uprising in 1991. There is a picture of kids dancing on an abandoned and burnt out Ba'athist tank, and I think of the kids I saw dancing on a burnt out US humvee in Sadr City three and a half weeks ago. There is also a series of pictures taken several weeks into the uprising, when the Ba'athists sent in heavily armed troops in an attempt to put it down. They show thousands of people fleeing into the mountains toward the Iranian border, where many sought refuge. I think of the long line of families that fled Falluja for Baghdad last month, when the uprising began and US marines began slaughtering.</p>
<p>In Baghdad recently, I have sensed a growing fear among average people – a fear not only induced by the terror spread by Occupation Forces in the prisons and in the neighborhoods, but also by the uncertainty about who will ultimately take power in the capital. In Suleymania, there is less fear – again, product of thirteen years of relative autonomy from Baghdad and a year of what people univocally refer to as liberation. But there is a clear undercurrent of anxiety that a government based in Baghdad will again seek to control this region and that genocidal policies will be implemented to decimate the Kurdish population once again. On a week in which an ex-Republican Guard general is sent into Falluja to pacify the resistance, it is a difficult anxiety to dismiss.</p>
<p>The Kurds are determined that this anxiety will not become reality. Their determination is perhaps one reason that the Referendum Movement has proven to have such strong grass-roots support here. Founded last July, the Referendum Movement has collected over 1,850,000 signatures in favor of a referendum on whether Kurdistan should secede, or remain a part of a federalist Iraq. The vast majority of the people we have spoken to here say they would prefer to remain a part of Iraq in the sort of federalist arrangement provided for in the transitional constitution – but only if that arrangement is genuinely accepted and respected by the rest of the country. For the leaders of the Referendum Movement, what is important is that the people of Kurdistan are able to choose democratically the route that will best allow them to pursue their goals as a society.</p>
<p>Perhaps it is easy for the anti-occupation movement to scoff at the Kurdish political parties for joining the US-picked IGC. Perhaps as anti-imperialists we believe that the Kurdish people in Iraq – who seem to genuinely support their PUK and KDP leaders on the IGC – have made a deal with the devil, and that it is almost inconceivable that the devil won’t sell them out when it suits him. I admit that I almost choked when our guide at the Halabja memorial told us “In those days of the attack, the mountains were our only friends. Now we have a very powerful friend in the United States.” Perhaps none of this addresses how Arab-Kurdish tensions could be addressed constructively in a future Iraqi state, federalist or otherwise.</p>
<p>But if we are going to oppose the injustice that is the US occupation of Iraq by appealing to the right to self-determination of Iraqi people, we also have to actively support the right to self-determination of the Kurdish people in Iraq – even if we don't much like how they're going about achieving it. And that is why visiting Kurdistan is a head wreck.</p>
<p>------</p>
<p>This report was written by Andréa Schmidt for the Iraq Solidarity Project. The Iraq Solidarity Project is a Montreal-based grassroots initiative to provide direct non-violent support to Iraqis struggling against the occupation; strengthen the mobilization against economic and military domination and anti-war work in Quebec and Canada; and build links of solidarity between struggles against the occupation of Iraq and struggles against oppression in Canada and Quebec.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomyextra field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above clearfix"><h3 class="field-label">Taxonomy upgrade extras: </h3><ul class="links"><li class="taxonomy-term-reference-0"><a href="/taxonomy/term/9">Iraq</a></li></ul></div>Tue, 04 May 2004 19:03:52 +0000justin32 at http://en-camino.orgOur Borders are Blast Wallshttp://en-camino.org/node/31
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Andrea Schmidt</p>
<p>April 19, 2004</p>
<p>As the US pursues its War of Terror in Iraq, the kidnappings of foreigners by the muqawama (resistance fighters) has grabbed the media spotlight. In response to the kidnappings, many international NGOs and humanitarian aid organizations have moved their foreign staff to Amman. Foreign journalists who haven’t already left the country are nearly paralyzed, reporting from their seats in front of TV sets in hotel compounds ‘secured’ by blast walls, armed guards and the right connections. This isn’t a huge change for the staffs of some news channels – for security reasons, CNN hasn’t let its foreign journalists out on the streets of Baghdad after 4 PM for the past year of occupation. But for many reporters, both independent and mainstream, the current immobility is insanely frustrating.</p>
<p>Those of us who came here as anti-war or anti-occupation activists intent on bearing witness to the injustices perpetrated by occupation authorities aren't managing a whole lot better. I haven't even really been out walking on the streets of Baghdad for a week now, and have submitted, in spite of my better sense of moral judgment, to being driven between 'safe' houses where sympathetic Iraqi and international friends have extended their hospitality.</p>
<p>The concrete blast walls that surround NGO, humanitarian aid organizations, ministry buildings, political party headquarters, the CPA and hotels frequented by foreigners in Iraq have always struck me as obscene. They are obscene because of the way in which they demarcate the lives that are considered worthy of 'protection' from those which are not, in the context of this occupation in which one of the most common complaints heard from ordinary Iraqis is the almost total lack of security that for themselves and their families.</p>
<p>The blast walls are also obscene because of the hypocrisy of NGOs and humanitarian organizations that they make manifest in concrete. They are barriers that prevent Iraq’s ‘multitudes’ -- the poorest people, the unemployed families whose women and children panhandle in the streets, people without the mandatory identification or the right contacts – from entering the very organizations and institutions that purport to be present to ‘help’ them. The blast walls send a message: “We will help you, but only at a distance, and only at a level of risk that WE choose and can control.”</p>
<p>At the same time as the fear of being kidnapped has paralyzed foreigners in Iraq, US Occupation Forces have massacred hundreds of people in the town of Falluja, a hundred people in Sadr City, bombed practically every one of Moqtada Al-Sadr’s offices in Baghdad and have announced that they will capture him dead or alive (essentially threatening to martyr him as Saddam martyred Moqtada’s father before him). Explosions resound across Baghdad at intervals throughout the day and night. The helicopters fly so low that the windows rattle.</p>
<p>This crossroads of terror has made me think constantly about the blast walls. I remember an observation made several weeks ago by a perceptive friend. For those of us who are ‘first-class’ citizens of North American or European countries in a global system best characterized as one of apartheid, our borders are blast walls. They shield us from the conflict and the poverty that our governments and our corporations create and profit from in the rest of the world.</p>
<p>Iraqis didn’t choose their country to be the battleground for George W. Bush’s War on Terror. And I don’t think that most of them would even have chosen it as the battleground for a righteous stand against US imperialism. That doesn’t mean that various sections of Iraqi society aren’t fighting and won’t continue to fight to resist the occupiers. They are and they will – and if the US forces that surround holy town of Najaf at this moment actually invade the town, Shiite resistance will begin in earnest and “it won’t ever stop.” At least that is the prediction of an acquaintance of mine, a Shiite man and an ex-officer in the Iraqi army who participated in the 1991 uprising against Saddam. But he also added, referring to the current Intifada, “we are not fighting for an anti-war or an anti-imperialist movement. We are fighting for the people of Iraq.”</p>
<p>If our borders are blast walls, then they are what many of us -- as anti-war and anti-imperialist activists living in Western countries -- rely on to keep a safe distance between ourselves and the danger-filled reality that Iraqis, peoples of other occupied and colonized nations, and people displaced by war, poverty and occupation have no choice but to survive on a day-to-day basis. Maybe solidarity and justice demand that we stop playing it so safe. Maybe it is time to put our own bodies at risk in the sort of direct actions that confront the empire within its own fortress. Maybe it is time to move the battleground within our own borders, and to become the resistance inside the blast walls – the sort of resistance which would effectively take them down.</p>
<p>------</p>
<p>This report was written by Andréa Schmidt for the Iraq Solidarity Project. The Iraq Solidarity Project is a Montreal-based grassroots initiative to provide direct non-violent support to Iraqis struggling against the occupation; strengthen the mobilization against economic and military domination and anti-war work in Quebec and Canada; and build links of solidarity between struggles against the occupation of Iraq and struggles against oppression in Canada and Quebec.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomyextra field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above clearfix"><h3 class="field-label">Taxonomy upgrade extras: </h3><ul class="links"><li class="taxonomy-term-reference-0"><a href="/taxonomy/term/9">Iraq</a></li></ul></div>Mon, 19 Apr 2004 19:05:22 +0000justin31 at http://en-camino.orgWar Without Endhttp://en-camino.org/node/30
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Andrea Schmidt</p>
<p>April 10, 2004</p>
<p>Iraq is a country at war.</p>
<p>Exactly a year after we were told that the war had ended and that freedom had been brought to the people of Iraq, the square in which Saddam’s statue was toppled was put under curfew again. The curfew didn't prevent a mortar attack on the Alwiyah Club that stands beside the square hidden behind blast walls.</p>
<p>Yesterday, reports from Falluja indicated that the city was still being held under siege by US Occupation Forces, as it had been since Tuesday. In the morning, word came that a cease-fire had been negotiated between US soldiers and resistance fighters, but by afternoon, the cease-fire was off. US Occupation Forces had continued to bomb the city with mortars, Apache helicopters, fighter planes, RPG7s and cluster bombs.</p>
<p>By evening, medical aid workers were giving the cautious estimate that the death-toll of this week’s massacre in Falluja had reached 427 Iraqis; 1200 people were said to be injured. An acquaintance arrived with video footage of families fleeing the city in an attempt to reach Baghdad. They formed a caravan that stretched over 10 kilometers long and were being prevented from advancing by US troops.</p>
<p>We do not have news of what is going on in the predominately Shia cities in the South where there has been fighting over the past days, and where people are preparing to celebrate Arbayeen, the end of Muharram. We rely on international news channels and the internet. But Muharram began with the bombing of shrines in Najaf and in Kadhimiya, that killed over 178 people. Who will decide that their interests might be served by attacking the pilgrimage?</p>
<p>The war is not a civil war; it is a war of terror in which collective punishment is a preferred tactic.</p>
<p>In Sadr City, where battles between resistance fighters from Moqtada Al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army and US Occupation Forces have gone on since last Sunday, families have spent sleepless nights listening to the sound of missiles, machine gun fire, tanks and low-flying helicopters.</p>
<p>On Wednesday morning, we visited a block of houses that had been hit by missiles they said were fired from a helicopter after 11:30 PM on Monday night. One missile hit the kitchen wall and blew up the kerosene tank, causing a fire. The second missile hit the outside wall of a second floor bedroom, destroying all the furniture within. A third missile hit the corner room of the building next door, in which food rations for 158 families were said to be stored. The food was destroyed. Families on the block have left temporarily to go and live with relatives or friends.</p>
<p>We also saw the burnt-out remains of two cars that neighbours say were shot by rockets fired from helicopters the night before. Two neighbors who tried to assist four people in one of the burning cars were shot at from tanks. A total of six people were reportedly killed in the two cars. No curfew had been imposed, but it seemed that US Occupying Forces were targeting any vehicles they found moving after dark.</p>
<p>"If America doesn't leave the areas, this will go on and on," said a man who said he witnessed the targeting of one of the cars. "America is fighting poor people…"</p>
<p>Indeed, this war is visibly being fought with tanks and RPG7s, with helicopters and cluster-bombs, but the years of US-supported Ba'athist dictatorship and the impoverishment of the majority of Iraqi people were also years of war. I listened yesterday as a Shia man told me that during the twelve years of UN-imposed sanctions, Shiite communities in Iraq really had to survive two sets of sanctions – one from outside Iraq, and one imposed by the dictatorship within. This disenfranchisement has not come to an end over the past year of war we’ve called occupation. Poverty, denial of education, malnutrition: these are also forms of war, as deadly in the long run as military machinery.</p>
<p>This is a war without end.</p>
<p>There is a feeling of hopelessness that permeates the present terror. As the number of kidnapped foreigners rises NGOs and humanitarian organizations are deliberating on whether or not to pack up and leave the country. A young Iraqi woman called me yesterday morning, greeting me with words dulled by resignation: “So we are at war again.” She told me to leave the country.</p>
<p>An Iraqi man I run into describes his country as a prison, but adds that “maybe prison is better, because at least in prison, there is a date when you know you can leave.” As a foreigner with a Canadian passport, I have the option of leaving and a choice to make.</p>
<p>We drive past the UNICEF compound and notice that new blast walls have put up, closing off the entrance to their offices. A road that was open two days ago is now blocked off by razor wire. The young man driving the car turns around and motions to the dead-end, a new variant on the many dead-ends that have turned the city into a labyrinth; “This is Iraq,” he says, and smiles.</p>
<p>----------</p>
<p>This report was written by Andréa Schmidt for the Iraq Solidarity Project. The Iraq Solidarity Project is a Montreal-based grassroots initiative to provide direct non-violent support to Iraqis struggling against the occupation; strengthen the mobilization against economic and military domination and anti-war work in Quebec and Canada; and build links of solidarity between struggles against the occupation of Iraq and struggles against oppression in Canada and Quebec.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomyextra field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above clearfix"><h3 class="field-label">Taxonomy upgrade extras: </h3><ul class="links"><li class="taxonomy-term-reference-0"><a href="/taxonomy/term/9">Iraq</a></li></ul></div>Sat, 10 Apr 2004 19:06:47 +0000justin30 at http://en-camino.orgEverything Changes so quicklyhttp://en-camino.org/node/29
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Thawra under attack</p>
<p>Andrea Schmidt</p>
<p>April 6, 2004</p>
<p>At 8 PM on Sunday night, Thawra looks like it is under curfew. At a time when they are normally thronging with people and filled with noise, the streets are dark, and all the shops are closed and locked for the night. Every few blocks we see groups of twenty or so young men in black moving restively and carrying guns Â– members of Moqtada Al-Sadr's Mehdi Army, patrolling their neighborhood. Other than that, the only people we see out are lined up in front of the Sadr hospital gates, waiting for news of the injured and the dead.</p>
<p>We hear tank fire in the distance, and drive past a burning US humvee. A few streets later, we pass a group of five US tanks; tense looking soldiers surround cuffed detainees.</p>
<p>"Everything changes so quickly," says Khaled, one of the young men with whom I am traveling. At noon, when he had left the area for the center of Baghdad, things were quiet in Thawra.</p>
<p>Indeed, at noon Moqtada's people were demonstrating downtown in Firdaus Square in front of the Palestine and Sheraton hotels -Â– yet another demonstration in a week-long series of protests to denounce Paul Bremer's decision to shut down Sadr's Al-Hawza newspaper for "making the security situation unstable" and "encouraging violence against the Coalition Forces and the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA)," by claiming that US troops were responsible for the destruction of an Iraqi police building in February.</p>
<p>The exact line of the occupiers' strategy is hard to discern. Is it to keep destabilizing the situation enough to qualify the transition to pseudo-sovereignty planned for June 30th as impossible and justify their continued presence here? Or is it to force a confrontation with the segments of the Iraqi political scene that they most want to see neutralized before the 'hand-over'? Whatever the exact nature of the strategy, shutting down the paper was a deliberate provocation. And it has been followed by more actions on the part of occupation authorities that are hard to interpret as anything but inflammatory attempts to fuel a frustrated reaction from Shiite loyal to Moqtada.</p>
<p>On Saturday night, Iraqi police fired into a crowd of demonstrators in Baghdad's Tahrir Square. According to media reports, three demonstrators were killed. So at Sunday's demonstration, when the angry and unarmed crowd of several hundred moved toward them, the US soldiers who guard the hotels from tanks and towers behind blast walls shot into the crowd, injuring at least two people.</p>
<p>Around the same time on Sunday, news began to reach Baghdad that protests in Kufa, Moqtada's base just outside of Najaf, had been shot at by Spanish and Salvadoran occupying forces. Twenty people were killed, according to news agencies, and over sixty injured.</p>
<p>So perhaps we should have known that things would come to this. We had driven into Thawra at 6:30 PM to meet with some people about organizing a film screening. As we arrived at the squatters' camp, we saw tire smoke in the distance and heard machine gun fire. We were told that there was fighting between Moqtada's people and US troops on the other side of the neighborhood, and that it wasn't a good evening to discuss anything.</p>
<p>Ahmed and Khaled drove me back toward the center of the city, but as we approached the blast-wall and private security protected hotel where I was supposed to meet other friends for the evening, I got frustrated. I didn't come to Iraq to watch the occupation from behind blast walls in upper class Jadriya where the old regime used to play. I came out of some desire to work for justice and to demonstrate solidarity with people struggling against the occupation Â–- and I have become angered by the lack of connection the anti-war and anti-occupation movement seems to have built here to the Shiite communities who were most horrifically oppressed under the Ba'athist regime and continue to be both politically and economically incredibly marginalized in occupied Iraq. Tonight, those people are the people of ThawraÂ…</p>
<p>Khaled was convinced by my rant, but worried about my safety. I was worried about his safety, since he was the one accompanying a foreigner at this particularly tense time. We agreed not be worried, and Ahmed turned the car around once again.</p>
<p>Still, when we return, we are surprised by the eerie empty streets. Machine gun fire continues in the darkness and Khaled and Ahmed both want to go to make sure their families are OK. They are, though the younger children are scared of the gunfire and the airplanes flying too low overhead.</p>
<p>At Khaled's house the family is gathered in the living room. We ask what happened and it seems that Moqtada's men took control of several police stations and local government buildings in Thawra in the late afternoon. US occupation forces responded with tank and helicopter fire. The neighborhood shut down, except for the fighting.</p>
<p>The men in the family reminisce about the uprising that took place when Saddam had Moqtada's father, Sayyid Mohamed Sadiq Al-Sadr, and his two elder sons assassinated in 1999. They remember the days of fighting with Saddam's security forces that ensued, and the blood and the death. Khaled tells me that the streets of his neighborhood tonight remind him of the way they looked then. This story has played itself out in Thawra many times before.</p>
<p>The only silver lining in all this: "Maku madrasa." There's no school for the kids tomorrow.</p>
<p>It is 9:30 and with erratic shooting audible in the environs, with no one on the street but US occupation forces and a few members of the Mehdi army, it is too late and too dangerous to drive back in to the center of the city. Khaled's family graciously allows me to stay with them for the night.</p>
<p>We hear the sound of missiles striking. I ask Khaled's nineteen year-old sister if she is afraid. No. We sleep.</p>
<p>On Monday morning, we go to the hospitals in the area. Conversations with hospital managers indicate that in the range of fifty people were killed by US occupation forces fire, and over 150 have been injured. Eight US soldiers were also killed.</p>
<p>In the hospital we are taken to the emergency area where we meet some of the injured. Among them is a fourteen year old boy, lying unconscious, breathing through a tube in his nose and receiving blood. He was shot by US fire that penetrated a closed door.</p>
<p>Outside in the hospital courtyard, an ambulance driver tells us how US troops had shot at him while he was trying to move the injured. A young man who has come to donate blood tells me, "I am a follower of Al-Sistani, not Moqtada. But if one of us is injured, all of us is injured, and if Moqtada says to fight, I will fight." No one seems to expect that the conflict will subside, in spite of the cool morning's apparent calm.</p>
<p>The streets of Thawra are filled with people, but many shops and most of the market stalls remain closed. A major intersection is still occupied by US tanks, and US tanks also surround Sadr's Baghdad offices. The humvee we saw burning last night is still smoldering, surrounded by dancing, yelling kids. Tension seems to rise palpably in Thawra as the morning wears on.</p>
<p>What will the evening bring? How will the Mehdi army respond to the occupation forces' assault on their people, and what sort of punishment will occupation forces seek to inflict?</p>
<p>I don't want to impose on Khaled's family for another night. So Khaled and Ahmed accompany me back to Baghdad city center, where I write this report from behind blast walls and feel sick that this is the best our movements can do.</p>
<p>This report was written by Andrea Schmidt for the Iraq Solidarity Project. The Iraq Solidarity Project is a Montreal-based grassroots initiative to provide direct non-violent support to Iraqis struggling against the occupation; strengthen the mobilization against economic and military domination and anti-war work in Quebec and Canada; and build links of solidarity between struggles against the occupation of Iraq and struggles against oppression in Canada and Quebec.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomyextra field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above clearfix"><h3 class="field-label">Taxonomy upgrade extras: </h3><ul class="links"><li class="taxonomy-term-reference-0"><a href="/taxonomy/term/9">Iraq</a></li></ul></div>Tue, 06 Apr 2004 19:09:05 +0000justin29 at http://en-camino.orgThere’s no explosions: it’s not an important areahttp://en-camino.org/node/28
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Traffic, security, freedom and justice in Thawra</p>
<p>Andrea Schmidt</p>
<p>March 29, 2004</p>
<p>Sadr City is a massive subdivision tacked on to the North end of Baghdad. It is home to 2 million of Baghdad’s 5 million residents. It is a Shia area, and mostly very poor.</p>
<p>During the regime era, the area was known as Saddam City and was strictly off limits to foreigners. Shia were kept out of universities and government jobs throughout the 80s and 90s – a silent freeze-out of the majority of Iraqis through which Saddam sought to divide Sunni and Shia and shore up his control. Many were isolated in Saddam City by poverty, and by the Mukhabarat.</p>
<p>Now, after the war, it has been re-named after Sayyid Mohammed Sadiq Al-Sadr, who used to preach against the US and ‘Satan,’ the name for Saddam that everyone here understood. Not surprisingly, in 1999 he became one of many Shia religious leaders to be assassinated by Saddam’s regime. But many residents still refer to the area as Thawra, a name that predates the occupation, the war and Saddam -- Thawra, which means ‘Revolution’.</p>
<p>I talk to some street kids hanging around squares in Baghdad’s city center, hawking electrical wire scavenged and stripped from bombed-out buildings. They ask me if I’m American and I hastily reply no, I’m Canadian, then feel sheepish about splitting hairs. I ask them where they’re from. “Thawra,” they reply with big smiles and in such a way that I fully expect them to start flashing hand signs.</p>
<p>That name, “Thawra,” is supposed to strike fear in the hearts of foreigners, who more or less try to avoid the area. Many of our translators come from well-off, well-educated Sunni backgrounds and have roughly the same reaction to the idea of spending time outside a car in Thawra that those of us who grew up in Toronto’s Bloor West Village or North Toronto have toward spending significant amounts of time in Dixon -- a combination of disdain, fear for their safety and incomprehension: “Why would you want to go there?”</p>
<p>I drive up with Khaled and Ahmed, two young men for whom that’s a non-question, since they’ve lived there all their lives. We go in the late afternoon, our windows rolled down to catch the evening breeze as it rises.</p>
<p>I ask Khaled why everyone is so scared of Sadr City, and why it is considered so unsafe. “I don’t know why they think it’s unsafe,” he answers. “Stupid people think this area is crazy or ali baba or something but when people come to the area they see that this is life. This is human, this is also human, I think.”</p>
<p>Portraits of Mohammed Al-Sadr have replaced the ubiquitous portraits of Saddam that used to stand on the street corners. There are also pictures of other religious leaders who were assassinated by the last regime. The face of Moqtada Al-Sadr, Mohammed’s twenty-seven year old son who has a massive following in the area’s mosques, is omnipresent. Moqtada, who during last Friday’s prayer in Kufa, near Najaf, denounced the US-designed Interim Constitution as “a terrorist law”* and between chants of “No No Israel, No No America,” urged those praying to “seek freedom and democracy in a way that satisfies God.” ** I ask Khaled if people in Thawra like Moqtada as much as they liked his father. Yes, they do.</p>
<p>There are a lot of sheep and goats, grazing on mounds of garbage on street corners and vacant lots. And compared to Baghdad City Center, the traffic is well- regimented. Several men direct it at each intersection. “Who are they?” I ask. They’re Moqtada’s men, and men from the Hawza, Khaled replies. “Why are they directing traffic?” “Because people here like to help.” Indeed. The religious groups have organized not only to direct traffic, but to take care of security and mosques.</p>
<p>I ask Khaled if there’s more freedom here now than before the war. He refuses to indulge the "I spoke to one Iraqi and he said" game: “Let’s ask people what they think,” he says, “maybe for one person there’s more freedom, maybe someone else feels there’s less…”. So we start by asking Ahmed, who immediately grows grim: “There’s no freedom and no security. I think Iraqi rights are missing. Simple things like explosions, it’s not safe – there’s no rights in my country.” He also cites a lack of jobs as a major problem. Ahmed is self-employed as the driver of a beat up old cab.</p>
<p>We visit a family. Khaled introduces me to Mohamed, one of three brothers who live in the house along with their wives, ten children and his mother. His little girl has a devastating skin disease that he has been told is caused by DU poisoning. He shows me around their almost completely unfurnished house and says that he has had to sell all the furnishings to try to buy medicine for her, but it isn’t enough. He is unemployed, and the CPA medical assistance people have not helped him access the medication. He has contacted the Ministry of Health, but has received no answer. He is angry: “Now that Saddam is gone, I still don’t have rights. Now I have trouble getting work, I can’t get a salary. Before the war or after the war, we still don’t have rights.”</p>
<p>I have my mini-disc recorder with me and I want to speak to the women who have silently accompanied us through the house . I ask Mohamed’s wife if I can interview her. He cuts in: “She doesn’t speak well.” That means no.</p>
<p>Khaled points out the headquarters of the Badr Army/Organization, which returned from exile in Iran ‘after’ the war, and has set up headquarters in an old Baathist ministry building in Thawra. The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution, with which the Badr Organization is affiliated, is a member of the Interim Governing Council. Next door, occupying another section of the old regime compound, are a group of squatters who needed housing and took it. Something about this makes me happy. Something about the fact that technically speaking, it is illegal to squat old ministry buildings in Iraq – a CPA order that seems to be enforced rather selectively in the squatters’ camps around town. And here is a GC member organization and poor people defying the order, side by side in the same compound.</p>
<p>Apparently US troops don’t come through Thawra all that visibly anymore. I see only one patrol all evening. There’s plenty of other men patrolling the streets with Kalashnikovs though, men doing “grassroots security” duty for groups of neighbors celebrating Muharram. It is 9 o’clock and there are tons of people outside. Muharram music is blaring in numerous spots; a video of a Sheikh preaching is being projected onto an outdoor wall and people are watching.</p>
<p>Khaled reflects on one of the ironies of the area’s continued marginality: “Before, people, cab drivers, used to be scared of coming here. Now, people are saying that it is maybe better in Thawra. There’s no explosions, it’s not an important area. People here like to help, people here are friendly really. Yeah, there’s problems, but…We hope for peace and freedom for everyone in Iraq and everyone in the world. We hope for justice for everyone.”</p>
<p>Justice… Watching the fires burning garbage on the street median, and catching a final glimpse of Sadrs father and son on a billboard as we leave the area, it’s somehow difficult to believe that anyone will be able to maintain the theory that Thawra isn’t an important area for long.</p>
<p>* Source: AFP ** Source: WorldNet (Note: I attended Friday prayer in Kufa, but am retroactively relying on news services for translation. Sketchy.)</p>
<p>-------</p>
<p>This report was written by Andréa Schmidt for the Iraq Solidarity Project. The Iraq Solidarity Project is a Montreal-based grassroots initiative to provide direct non-violent support to Iraqis struggling against the occupation; strengthen the mobilization against economic and military domination and anti-war work in Quebec and Canada; and build links of solidarity between struggles against the occupation of Iraq and struggles against oppression in Canada and Quebec.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomyextra field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above clearfix"><h3 class="field-label">Taxonomy upgrade extras: </h3><ul class="links"><li class="taxonomy-term-reference-0"><a href="/taxonomy/term/9">Iraq</a></li></ul></div>Mon, 29 Mar 2004 19:10:13 +0000justin28 at http://en-camino.orgOccupied Iraq Reporthttp://en-camino.org/node/24
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>One Year After the Invasion, Iraqi and International Human Rights<br />
Organizations Plan Three Days of Solidarity with Iraqi People Suffering<br />
Under Occupation</p>
<p>Andrea Schmidt</p>
<p>March 14, 2004</p>
<p>In the week leading up to the anniversary of the last year’s US-led invasion of Iraq, communities around the world are mobilizing to march again to say no to war and to occupation.</p>
<p>Here in Iraq, over the past week, the occupation has wormed its way ever deeper into Iraq’s soil and into its future. The interim constitution, known as the Transitional Administrative Law, which will govern the transition of power to an appointed government in June was signed by the Interim Governing Council on Monday, after a number of false starts. And in spite of the transition to a nominally ‘sovereign’ -- if unelected -- Iraqi government in June, the US has announced that it will maintain military control of Iraq’s security forces for two years. A US general will be at the helm of a multinational security force which will include the Iraqi army, and a second US general will head up the Operations unit.</p>
<p>The announcement comes as Iraqi and international organizations prepare “Three Days of Solidarity with Iraqi People Suffering Under Occupation”, a series of events that will be held in Baghdad from Tuesday, March 16th to Friday, March 19th and which aim to denounce the large-scale violation of Iraqis’ human rights by occupation forces over the past year.</p>
<p>The Days of Solidarity are being called under the slogan: “After three decades of human rights abuses under the old regime, we don’t need to endure any more violations!” The events will provide a forum for individuals whose rights have been violated by occupation forces, and their families to come and tell their stories. Their stories will be documented by a team of human rights lawyers, in the view of eventually submitting them to the Ministry of Human Rights of Iraq and the United Nations Human Rights Commission.</p>
<p>What sort of stories? Last week I accompanied Paola and Ismail, two human rights activists, to a town just North of Baghdad, where we met with two families with direct experience of the brutality of occupation forces. Ismail Daoud works with the Association for the Defense of Human Rights in Iraq, and Paola Gasparoli is an international working with theOccupation Watch Center. Both organizations are involved in putting together the “Three Days of Solidarity.”</p>
<p>Last January, they released a report on the CPA’s compensation process, according to which Iraqis who have suffered theft, damages, injury or death of a relative at the hands of US occupying forces in a ‘non-combat situation’ can file a claim for financial restitution for their losses. The report described in detail the sorts of violations committed by occupation forces. Last week’s trip was the sort of visit that Paola and Ismail have made numerous times over the past several months -- a fact that in no sense diminished the horrific nature of the stories the families recounted.</p>
<p>The first story goes like this: One night in late December, US forces exploded the door of the family’s home. They pulled everyone from their beds, leaving some of the women no time to put on hijab. They were looking for the eldest brother, who was in Baghdad for the night. They pushed the two younger brothers and the father onto the ground, held them at gunpoint and demanded to know where the brother was. They beat the father, who is diabetic and has heart problems. They ransacked the house, throwing the Qu’ran onto the ground and stomping on it in the process. Finally, they arrested the middle brother and took the eldest sister hostage, saying that the brother they were searching for would be sure to turn up if they arrested her too.</p>
<p>While in detention, the brother was interrogated and tortured. Lying on the ground, his head was stomped on by US soldiers, and he was repeatedly beaten. First they wanted to know where his brother was. Then they wanted him to name people in old pictures they had taken from his family house -- many of them of people he didn’t know, in photos taken before he was born. They threatened to kill his sisters if he didn’t cooperate. Then they asked him to inform on his friends. Ultimately they tortured him until he led them to a friend’s house.</p>
<p>Three days later, the older brother had returned from Baghdad and, hearing from the rest of his family what had happened, he went to the police station where his siblings were being held. The authorities there did not arrest him, and questioned him only briefly, although he had been the ostensible target of the search operation. Finally, all three siblings were released together. But the beatings he received in detention have left the young man, roughly my age, deaf in his left ear and with blurry vision in his left eye.</p>
<p>The second story was told by a family mourning the murder of their son by occupation forces. On a night in January, their son was returning from a nearby town with his cousin. The two young men were stopped by Iraqi police at a checkpoint, searched and then told to proceed onward. Then they were then stopped by US soldiers, who first searched them and then let them go, then stopped them again and forced them into their armed personel carrier. Next to the river, the soldiers made both men get out of the car, and at gun point, obliged them to jump into the river just below the dam, where water fell with greatest force. The cousin was lucky and was able to grab onto a branch that saved his life. The son drowned.</p>
<p>His family found his body in a small river behind the dam. They buried him, and went to the US military to demand some sort of justice. The US military denied categorically that the murder had taken place; its soldiers would never perpetrate such crimes. The family told them they had witnesses, and the military demanded that an autopsy be done on the body. The family went to the Islamic Council, and received permission to exhume their son’s body. Now they are waiting for occupation authorities to fly in a US military doctor from Washington, who alone, it seems, is competent enough to examine the body.</p>
<p>Faced with stories such as these, the disingenuity of the basic premises of the compensation process is patently obvious. How could even the most ‘fair’ and accessible of processes adequately compensate a family for the loss of their son, or a young man for the loss of his hearing and his sight, or a young woman for the trauma of being taken hostage to lure one brother and manipulate another? How could even the best and most generous compensation process imaginable mitigate or erase the injustice of an illegal occupation pursued for purposes of pillage and global dominance? Yet, as Paola and Ismail’s report pointed out, the US compensation process is far from fair or generous; it heaps insult upon injury. Getting through the bureaucracy is a Kafkaesque experience for Iraqis, which they frequently endure only to end up with a “bureaucratic smile” and the dismissal of their cases on the grounds that the crimes were committed ‘in a combat situation.’ (A link to the full report is included at the end of this email.)</p>
<p>Equally egregious violations of the basic rights of detainees are being perpetrated by occupying forces in detention centers across Iraq. The Christian Peacemaker Team in Iraq authored a report on the inhumane treatment of Iraqi detainees by occupation forces in December 2003. At the end of February, they began a 40 day campaign, fasting and praying in public squares in Baghdad and in towns in the surrounding area, in order to denounce these violations and to demand just treatment for all detainees: access to a lawyer, being informed of their charges, access to their families, freedom from torture and physical and psychological abuse, water, and bathroom facilities.</p>
<p>At each vigil in Al-Tahrir square in Baghdad, hundreds of people approach the line of CPTers who hold large pictures of detainees. Some tell stories of their own detention, or the detention of one of their loved ones. Some speak out of curiosity, asking the CPT members why, as foreigners, and as American foreigners no less, they care. Some ask challenging questions, questions the vast majority of the anti-occupation movement must reckon with: “Why weren’t you here when Saddam was ?”.</p>
<p>The “Three Days of Solidarity” will be built around these stories, around issues related to compensation and detention, and on the obligations of occupying forces to provide for the security of civilians according to the Geneva conventions. On Thursday, the day devoted to the rights of detainees, families will be invited to join the CPT’s vigil in Al-Tahrir Square. Then families, supporters and members of the convening organizations will march from Al-Tahrir Square to CPA headquarters in the Green Zone to demand just treatment for all those detained.</p>
<p>The almost laughable understatement of the banner slogan speaks volumes about some of the realities of the occupation: After three decades of human rights abuses under the old regime, Iraqi people reallly don’t need to endure any more violations.</p>
<p>------- Please take a look at the following resources for more comprehensive information about detention and compensation issues in occupied Iraq:</p>
<p>Report on Detentions and Detainees (Christian Peacemaker Team in Iraq; December 2003)</p>
<p>Justice for Detainees: An interview with Peggy Gish of the Christian Peacemaker Team in Iraq (February 26 2004) URL: http://www.radio4all.net/proginfo.php?id=8803 mp3: ftp://ftp.radio4all.net/pub/radio/20040228cpt.mp3</p>
<p>Joint Report on Civilian Casualties and Claims Related to US Operations (Occupation Watch and The National Association for the Defense of Human Rights in Iraq; January 2004)</p>
<p>-------</p>
<p>This report was written by Andréa Schmidt for the Iraq Solidarity Project. The Iraq Solidarity Project is a Montreal-based grassroots initiative to provide direct non-violent support to Iraqis struggling against the occupation; strengthen the mobilization against economic and military domination and anti-war work in Quebec and Canada; and build links of solidarity between struggles against the occupation of Iraq and struggles against oppression in Canada and Quebec.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomyextra field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above clearfix"><h3 class="field-label">Taxonomy upgrade extras: </h3><ul class="links"><li class="taxonomy-term-reference-0"><a href="/taxonomy/term/9">Iraq</a></li></ul></div>Sun, 14 Mar 2004 19:11:48 +0000justin24 at http://en-camino.orgReport from Occupied Iraqhttp://en-camino.org/node/22
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Andrea Schmidt</p>
<p>February 29 - March 4 2004</p>
<p>I have been in occupied Iraq for just over a week. Long enough to know understand that the political situation in Iraq is profoundly complicated in a way that would have been impossible to understand had I not come here.</p>
<p>Thus, you should receive this first report, members of the anti-occupation and anti-’war on terror’ movements in Montreal, Quebec and Canada, with healthy skepticism, because it doesn’t begin to do justice to that complexity... What can I possibly say after being here, in this profoundly complicated place, after only a week and a half?</p>
<p>Still, I will share my first impressions of Baghdad, and a couple of stories that perhaps give a sense of some aspects of life under occupation.</p>
<p>I discovered Baghdad much as it had been described to me.</p>
<p>Almost a year after the US-led invasion of the country, crumbling shells of buildings -- old government buildings, theaters and communications stations -- stand testament to the bombing campaign, a bombing campaign that Iraqis hasten to remind me was much less severe than the one the US launched in 1991. This war, this occupation cannot be isolated from that earlier war, or for that matter, from the 12 years of UN sanctions that ensued.</p>
<p>There are mundane ways in which the occupation holds sway over Baghdad.</p>
<p>The traffic is heavy and chaotic, and makes navigating the city is quite a challenge. There seem to be a surplus of cars, and so many roads have been blocked off and rerouted by heavy concrete blast walls and barbed wired erected around various ministry, hotel and NGO compounds that there don’t seem to be direct routes to anywhere. Traffic lights are nonfunctional, and even on the rare occasions when there are traffic cops directing traffic, no one pays attention to them. What should be a fifteen minute drive often takes over an hour. Remarkably, I have seen no collisions.</p>
<p>The lineups for gasoline that stretched for kilometers suddenly abated a couple of weeks before I arrived. A regulation was put in place in Baghdad that assigns drivers specific weekdays on which they can buy gas according to their license plate numbers, and this has made the lineups much shorter. One Iraqi acquaintance wondered at how quickly and simply the problem was solved after so many months of people spending literally days waiting for gas, as though the authorities wanted to distract Baghdadis from the real political and social issues, and the interminable waits and frustration over the gasoline shortage was a welcome means of doing so. The black-market sale of gasoline sales is still going strong; anyone who drives for a living has to keep their car filled up at all times can’t be limited to buying gas on specific days of the week.</p>
<p>Electricity is sporadic. It comes in cycles: several hours on, several hours off. Most office buildings and hotels have hefty generators up and running within seconds each time the power goes off, but families living in regular flats are not usually so fortunate.</p>
<p>12 million people are unemployed in this country with a population of 26 million, according to Falah Alwan, President of the Federation of Workers’ Counsels and Trade Unions of Iraq. And poverty is very evident on the streets of Baghdad. Women beg in the streets with their children, people are squatting half-destroyed houses, and I haven’t even been to the poor areas of town yet.</p>
<p>US helicopters circle low overhead all the time, and particularly at night. For the first week I was here, US troops seemed to be keeping a low profile in Baghdad, increasingly putting Iraqi policemen on guard in front of hotels known to be frequented by contractors and Western journalists and buildings in which CPA and Interim Governing Council conferences are held.</p>
<p>There are no shortage of horror stories of crimes perpetrated against Iraqis by occupation forces either. They swirl through the city like dry autumn leaves, followed by a steady stream of journalists, some well-intentioned, others cynical and some maybe both.</p>
<p>Like the story I heard told by a young Iraqi translator about his friend. Both of them had been working as translators for the Coalition Provisional Authority. His friend had an ear infection and traded his morning shift for a friend’s evening shift. That morning, explosions were detonated in Kirkuk. When he returned to work, CPA authorities demanded to why he had needed to change his schedule, implying that he had been involved in the mornings’ bombings. He was arrested, and has been detained without charge for the past month and a half at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. The human rights activists working here estimate that there are about 10,000 security detainees held at Abu Ghraib prison alone and 18,000 in Iraq as a whole, where they are denied anything akin to due process and are subject to harrowing conditions. (For more information about security detainees, check out the Christian Peacemaker Team in Iraq’s site: http://www.cpt.org/iraq/iraq.php.)</p>
<p>Or the story, heard third hand, of approximately 25 families in Hilla, a town south of Baghdad, under the control of Polish occupation forces. The families, displaced during the bombing last year, were squatting houses built during Saddam’s regime for the officers of the Iraqi army near the base located in the area. The Polish troops have been using the old Iraqi army base as their own, and decided they wanted to expand it. So they went to the families and told them to leave. The families agreed, on condition that Coalition Authorities find them other housing to move to. Three days later, the area was bombed by US planes, the houses destroyed and many members of the families killed in the bombing. The Polish forces have moved the walls of their base to enclose the rased area.</p>
<p>Today brought its own story, heavily reported in the international news as I write the first draft of this report. Today is Ashura, a major day of celebration and mourning for Shia muslims. It commemorates the martyrdom of Imam Hussein in the battle of Karbala, that falls on the tenth day of the month of Muharram (the first month of the Islamic calendar). The death of Imam Hussein essentially marks the point in history at which the main branches of Islam, Sunni and Shia, parted ways. Traditionally, Ashura has been celebrated by Shia people performing pageants recreating the battle and the death of Hussein and performing self-flagellation rituals in mourning. Under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, Shia were oppressed in a number of ways; one was that were not allowed to celebrate Ashura, and so today is the first time in thirty years that the pageants and the pilgrimages to the principle Shiite shrines in Karbala and in Kadhimiya, a Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad, were going to be performed.</p>
<p>Shia communities have been preparing for today since the beginning of Muharram. And it feels like everyone had been holding their breath to see what would happen. Would the day be allowed to come and go in relative tranquility? Or would the occasion, with its celebrations and large crowds of pilgrims from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, be targeted to foment political and religious tensions between Shiite and Sunni?</p>
<p>I have visited Kadhimiya several times since I arrived here. The first time was last Monday. There US tanks and soldiers blocking major roads leading to the Al-Khadim mosque in the middle of the neighborhood. On Thursday, a rocket hit the exterior wall of the shrine. No one was injured, but the people of Kadhimiya were furious and demonstrated against occupying troops. Sheikh Majid of the Al-Khalisia madrasa recounted how people had approached US tanks shouting “Death to the occupation” and refused to disperse when US soldiers aimed the tanks’ fire arms at the crowd. On Friday, when we returned for Muharram celebrations, the occupying forces had left. Young boys were everywhere, preparing for Ashura.</p>
<p>This morning, 6 explosions hit shrines in Karbala. At least two explosions hit the Al-Kadhim shrine in Kadhimya. News agencies are reporting that there were 185 people killed, and several hundred injured, and the death toll seems likely to rise. (As I edit this, Sheikhs in Kadhimiya are saying that 285 people have died as a result of the attacks in both cities).</p>
<p>Three days of national mourning have been declared, funerals are being held, and Shiite and Sunni leaders are calling for unity in the face of what I think is widely perceived as an attempt to fuel tensions between Shia and Sunni and provoke a civil war in occupied Iraq.</p>
<p>No group has claimed responsibility for the attacks, and people are left to speculate and develop their own theories. And if the religious leaders and members of the Interim Governing Council are accusing US authorities of being unable to ensure Iraqis’ security, the majority of Iraqis I have spoken with accuse the US of actually being behind the attacks, whether directly or indirectly. The obvious argument is that by exacerbating the social divisions and prejudice that Saddam’s regime nurtured between the two groups, and fostering the out-break of a civil conflict, the US can try to justify its continued military presence here -- not in the name of freedom for Iraqis this time, but in the name of peace and security.</p>
<p>On the streets of Baghdad today, sorrow and tension are palpable as people mourn the dead, and the state of this occupied and terrorized country, and wonder what comes next.</p>
<p>---<br />
This report was written by Andréa Schmidt for the Iraq Solidarity Project. The Iraq Solidarity Project is a Montreal-based grassroots initiative to provide direct non-violent support to Iraqis struggling against the occupation; strengthen the mobilization against economic and military domination and anti-war work in Quebec and Canada; and build links of solidarity between struggles against the occupation of Iraq and struggles against oppression in Canada and Quebec.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomyextra field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above clearfix"><h3 class="field-label">Taxonomy upgrade extras: </h3><ul class="links"><li class="taxonomy-term-reference-0"><a href="/taxonomy/term/9">Iraq</a></li></ul></div>Thu, 04 Mar 2004 19:13:28 +0000justin22 at http://en-camino.org